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Formosa Tea

Game ID: GID0132456
Collection Status
Description

The sub-tropical climate and environment of Taiwan makes the island highly suitable for cultivating top quality tea. But it wasn't not until the 19th century after English businessman John Dodd discovered some amazing Oolong tea there that the Taiwanese tea business truly begin to bloom and "Formosa Tea" became world-reknowned.

In Formosa Tea, players are tea farm owners competing to harvest the best tea leaves, improve their tea processing techniques, and produce tea of the highest quality for not only the domestic market but also for the international market. With the unique worker placement and worker advancement mechanisms, along with the tea dehydration and scenting processing, players must use their workers wisely to make the best tea in the market.

A game of Formosa Tea is played in four rounds. In each round, players take turns to perform one of the five possible actions:

Send a worker to harvest tea leaves
Send a worker to a tea factory to process tea leaves
Retrieve a worker from the tea factory after tea processing is completed
Send a worker to sell tea in the domestic market
Send a worker to sell tea to international merchants.

After the end of the fourth round, the player who has the most prestige points wins!

Year Published
2019
Transcript Analysis
Browse transcript mentions, sentiments, pros/cons, mechanics, topics, quotes, and references.
Total mentions: 1
This page: 1
Sentiment: pos 1 · mix 0 · neu 0 · neg 0
Mentions per page
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Video LUWGaJh8m-g Board Game Geek Podcast top_5_list at 50:23 sentiment: positive
video_pk 2136 · mention_pk 6269
Video thumbnail
Click to watch at 50:23
Overall sentiment (raw)
positive
Pros
  • Beautiful, painterly art with a refined color palette
  • Deep and thematically cohesive tea production simulation
Cons
  • Rulebook may require study and external references for mastery
Thematic elements
  • tea cultivation, processing, and distribution
  • Taiwanese tea production; historical and culturally rich setting
  • nerdy and detailed with a focused theme
Comparison games
none
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
  • Resource management — Manage different teas with varying processing steps to fulfill orders.
  • Worker placement / action selection — Players place workers to harvest, process, and fulfill orders for teas.
Video topics + discussion points
No key topics recorded for this video.
Quotes (from this video)
  • It's like a board game summer camp at a hotel.
  • You just get so much gaming in.
  • Board game goals. I like that.
  • It's always a lot of fun when you find the right people.
References (from this video)
No references stored for this video.
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